Ontological Concepts Dependencies Driven Methodology to Design Ontology-Based Databases

Abstract. Nowadays, a large number of applications are producing and manipulating ontological data. Managing a huge amount of these data needs the development of scalable solutions. Ontology-based database (OBDB) is one of these solutions. An OBDB stores in the same reposi-tory ontological data and the ontology describing their meanings. Several architectures supporting these OBDB were proposed by academicians and industrial editors of DBMS. Unfortunately, there is no available methodology for designing such OBDB. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes to scale up the traditional database design approaches to OBDB. Our approach covers both conceptual and logical modeling phases. It assumes the availability of a domain ontology composed by canonical and non canonical concepts. Dependencies between properties and classes are captured and exploited to define a two levels normal-ized logical model without redundancy (canonical): at class level and at class properties level. A prototype implementing our methodology on the OBDB OntoDB is outlined.